Pillar of Fire Page 40

  Nofret had been the fool after all. Ankhesenamon had seen clear from the first. Horemheb was much as ever, briskly efficient, cool and practical. And very, very dangerous.

  The words he spoke were reasonable words. He had simply been doing his duty, protecting the borders of Egypt from invading armies and defending his queen’s honor against a terrible slander. Yet he knew. It was in his eyes, clear to read. He knew that Prince Zennanza had told the truth. He had discovered everything that the Hittites knew, that they told him in all innocence, not suspecting that there was danger in the queen’s man if the queen herself had bidden them come to her. They had told him everything, as trusting as children, and he had turned on them and slaughtered them.

  “Of course,” he said, “once I had disposed of our so-clever invaders, I had to make sure that they weren’t leading the whole army of Hatti against us. I forayed some distance into their country, sacked and burned a village or two, left them a message that they couldn’t mistake. They won’t try any such audacity with us again. Claiming that you had invited one of them to be king in Egypt—how blind did they think I could be?”

  “Do you expect,” asked Ankhesenamon, so low that Nofret could barely hear her, “that I should reward you for this gift?”

  “I expect nothing”’ said Horemheb, “but what is my due from the Lady of the Two Lands.”

  She bent her head. It might have been a nod. It might have been weariness beyond endurance, bowing under the weight of the crown. “You will receive your due,” she said, a little louder than before. “You may felicitate me on my marriage to the Lord Ay, and the Lord Ay on his accession to the throne. Both will be done as soon as he arrives in Memphis.”

  Horemheb’s eyes narrowed. “I felicitate you, lady,” he said with a suggestion of clenched teeth, “and your lord. Does he know yet of his good fortune?”

  “He fully expects it,” she said. “Your excellence in defense of these kingdoms must be well recompensed. Go now, while we consider how best to go about it.”

  oOo

  Long after he was gone, her maids and servants dismissed, the counselors sent stumbling and yawning to their own houses, Ankhesenamon sat in her chair of audience with the bronze casket open at her feet. Prince Zennanza’s face stared up at her in mild astonishment, as if it had not quite dawned on him that he was dead. He must have died quickly and in little pain: there was no fear there, no sign of anguish. It was little enough mercy in the circumstances.

  “His father will be very angry,” said Ankhesenamon. She sounded perfectly cool and rather remote. Inside, Nofret knew, she was weeping and raging.

  “It will serve that man right,” Nofret observed, “if he’s got us into a war with Hatti.”

  Ankhesenamon slanted a glance at her. “So you think I’m not so foolish after all? But I am. He spoke this much truth: that I did ill in asking a foreign prince to protect me from him. I never thought that prince would be caught and killed. There are always people coming across our borders, traders, embassies, traveling lords and princes. No one stops them, no one prevents them, even when they seem to come in arms. And I was so careful. I kept my secret. I knew that if he guessed, if he discovered—”

  She stopped. “Do you think…were we betrayed? Did he let it all happen, letters and embassy and all, simply so that he could do this to me, bring me the head of my husband-to-be as if it were a gift and a tribute?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nofret. “I think he guessed at the very least, and when the prince came, he asked and was answered. He did his duty to the letter, knowing what it would mean to you.”

  “He has a peculiar way of showing me that he wants me,” said Ankhesenamon. She rose, stiff as an old woman, and laid down her scepter, and knelt to close the casket. The sound of the lid’s shutting was distinct and somehow final.

  She stood. “He will never have me. That I swear to you. If I have to lock myself in my own tomb in order to escape him, then I will do it.”

  A practical servant might point out that Horemheb was clearly stronger than a Hittite prince and more likely to be able to rule Egypt. But Nofret was done with being practical. She had seen the look in Horemheb’s eyes when he gave his gift to the queen. It was the look of a man who does exactly as he pleases, when it pleases him, and calls it duty and honor; who acts on behalf of kingdoms, but whose actions always and ultimately serve himself foremost.

  Such men made great kings and strong generals. They made the kingdom’s good their own, and defended it fiercely. But they were never to be trusted. If Horemheb decided that the kingdom—by which he meant himself—was best served by the queen’s death, then he would have her killed.

  He had done just that, she suspected, in disposing of Smenkhkare and Meritaten. Tutankhamon . . . who knew? It had seemed to be an accident. Perhaps it was. Perhaps the queen saw true, and it was Horemheb’s design and his will to be rid of the last obstacle to the throne of Egypt.

  “But,” said Nofret out of the depths of her reflections, “what of the Lord Ay? He’ll die, too, if you marry him.”

  “I must marry someone,” said Ankhesenamon. “He expects it. I’ll give it to him. And warn him, and pray that he can defend himself. He was a lord in the Two Lands long before Horemheb came out of his father’s hovel to be a king’s soldier. Maybe he’ll be stronger after all than a foreigner could be, even a Hittite prince.”

  She spoke firmly, but her hands were trembling. She looked about as if distracted. “Oh, I hope he can be stronger. Did you see that man’s eyes? He wants more than the throne. He wants my soul. He’ll take it unless I fight him. He’ll devour it whole.”

  “He’s not as bad as that,” said Nofret. “He wants to be king, that’s all. And you carry the king-right.”

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon. “He’s an eater of souls. He’s hungry for mine. I can feel him sniffing about me, gnawing at my edges.”

  Nofret, listening to her, began to grow alarmed. The queen had been troubled, but in reasonable fashion; afraid, but with cause, after what she had done in summoning an enemy of Egypt to be her consort. One would expect that she would fear for herself now that she was discovered.

  But this was more than plain human fear. It was obsession. She was trembling as if with cold, but her skin was burning hot. She had fretted herself into a fever.

  Nofret coaxed the queen out of the hall of audience and down the passage into her private chambers. There were maids hovering. Nofret drove them out. She undressed her lady by herself, washed her with water scented with green herbs, dressed her in a light linen robe and persuaded her to lie down on her resting-couch.

  She lay rigid, shivering in spasms. “He’ll consume me,” she said over and over. “He means to. I know it. I feel it. Can’t you feel it, Nofret? Can’t you feel it in your bones?”

  Forty-Four

  The queen was ill, if not to death, then close enough that Nofret took it on herself to send a swift messenger to Thebes, bidding the Lord Ay come to Ankhesenamon in Memphis. The man carried a warning likewise for Ay’s ears alone: to fear Horemheb and trust no one.

  Nofret thought long on poison or on dark magic as a cause of Ankhesenamon’s sickness. She had the skill to detect neither, nor was there anyone in Memphis whom she dared ask. She could think of no one there whom she could trust, not one, except Ankhesenamon herself. Leah, if she still lived, was in Thebes. Of Johanan she knew nothing—and what could he do? He was too conspicuous to conceal himself among the servants. He had no arts that she knew of, except the overseeing of stonecutters and the crossing of deserts and the shooting of a bow. None of those could be of use in the close and stifling confinement of the queen’s palace.

  She was alone in the royal city, alone and surrounded by strangers. All the years she had lived there, she had made no friends, nor known she needed any. Now when her lady was ill in the spirit as in the body, she did not even trust the maids who flocked about, alternately weeping and chattering. Any one of them might have dropped the p
oison in her lady’s cup, or helped to make the magic that cast her down living and aware into the dark.

  None of them seemed suspicious of anything but fever and grief excessively prolonged. They talked about it in Ankhesenamon’s presence, where she could hear if she roused from her dream. “She must marry again,” they said. “She gnaws herself with grief for her husband. A new husband, a young one maybe, and strong, will teach her to forget that poor lost boy.”

  They could not know that she had tried to do just that, and been forestalled by the one man she feared most. She did not babble in her fever as most people did. She lay silent, barely moving except to draw a breath. Her lips were tight shut. Her eyes opened on occasion and stared blindly into the dark, before they closed again in the sunken sockets.

  One deep night when the maids were asleep and the shadows chittering among themselves, Nofret unwound the amulets of Amon and of Sobek from the plaits of her hair and bound them about her lady’s neck. The queen was armored in amulets already, images of every god and power that priest or physician could think of, but Nofret’s spirit wanted to believe that her two had some power that the others lacked. Loyalty, maybe. Love for her lady, whom she did not quite call friend—part of herself, rather, like a second shadow.

  The rest of the amulets were set to cure the queen of sickness. On these Nofret laid a simple prayer: “Free her from fear. Bring her back to me alive and whole.”

  It was a paltry thing, but it was all Nofret could do till the Lord Ay came. If he would come. She was sunk as low as that: she wondered if even he could be trusted, who had always been purely loyal to the children of his daughter Nefertiti. What if after all he were in league with Horemheb, with the Two Crowns for their prize? Power could twist even the best of men, could transform him into a parody of himself.

  Nofret shut down the thought. She must go on hoping, and hope lay in the Lord Ay. He was old, and there were rumors that his health was no longer of the best, but he was wise and canny and he loved his granddaughter. He would know what to do.

  Nofret had been braced for the sight of him after the tales that she had heard. Even so she was shocked when he came from his boat into the palace, not even pausing to change out of his traveling clothes before he looked on the queen. As old as he had been when he wore the Blue Crown at the burial of Tutankhamon and performed the rites of the royal heir, now he was ancient. He was still tall, but his back was bent and stooped, and his face was deeply scored with age and weariness. His teeth, that had been strong for an Egyptian’s, were gone; his lips had fallen in, his speech grown slurred and soft.

  But the eyes were still clear in the altered face, and the mind had not failed of its keenness. He looked long at the queen lying all but lifeless in her bed. Then he dismissed the servants and the hangers-on, all but Nofret, and sent his own attendants to prepare chambers for him as near to the queen as might be.

  There would still be listening ears. There was no avoiding them in palaces. He spoke to Nofret in a language she had not known he knew, though considering his father and his history he certainly must: the speech of the Apiru. She spoke it middling badly but understood it well enough. “Tell me now,” he said, “and be quick. Is she poisoned?”

  His speech was crisper in the Apiru tongue, even through toothless gums. Nofret shook her head in answer but said as best she could, “I don’t know. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. Or maybe it’s an ill magic.”

  “I have priests with me,” he said, “and physicians, and masters of magic both good and ill. They will do their duty as they can. But I ask you. Do you think someone has endangered her?”

  “I think one man or more than one would be pleased to see her dead,” said Nofret “The more so if word gets out of what she tried to do.”

  “The prince from the north?” Ay shook his head. “That was very ill thought of.”

  “But how did you—”

  Nofret broke off, but Ay had heard enough to answer. “Very little in the Two Lands can be done completely in secret. I heard of it too late, from one who knew I could be trusted. I would have stopped her if I could.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Nofret. “She’s my lady and my queen.”

  “And you come from his country,” Ay said. “No one will hold you at fault. But she did an unwise thing.”

  “She was afraid,” Nofret said.

  “So should she have been,” said the Lord Ay. He paused as if considering what he should say—perhaps determining whether she could be trusted. At length he said, “Her fears were well founded. Her error was to believe that no one in the Two Lands could be trusted, and that only a foreign king—a king who had but lately been our enemy in war—could protect her from the one she feared most of all.”

  “He is to be feared,” said Nofret. “I thought not, but then I saw his face when he stood in front of my lady. He wants what he should never think to have.”

  “After me,” the Lord Ay said, “there may be no one more able to hold it.”

  “He is dangerous.”

  “He is a man who believes himself fit to be king. He well may be. He’s an excellent general, a strong commander of men. We’ve lacked such a one for too long.”

  “But you—” Nofret began.

  “I grow old,” he said, dispassionate. “I’ll die in a year, two, three. Someone has to come after me.”

  “Then you would advise her to accept the suit of a man who may intend to kill her once he has her?”

  “He won’t kill her,” said Ay. “In his way he wants her as much as a man can want a woman.”

  “And she hates the sight of him.”

  Ay sighed. “It was never ordained by any god that the human heart should be a reasonable thing. She loved her husband. She believes that he died at an enemy’s instigation. So he may have done; but a queen must be practical.”

  “You won’t marry her yourself? She thinks you can protect her.”

  “I can protect her till I die,” he said. “Maybe that will be long enough for her to recover from her beloved’s death, and see reason. I hope it will be long enough.”

  “He might try to kill you,” said Nofret.

  “He may try,” said the Lord Ay with a flicker of his old fire.

  oOo

  Ankhesenamon seemed to gain strength from her grandfather’s presence. His priests and physicians were no more illustrious than her own, but with so many in attendance, besieging the gods and invoking the powers, she had no choice but to rally. By the evening of Ay’s second day in Memphis, she came to herself enough to open her eyes and look at him and whisper, “Grandfather?”

  He clasped her fragile hand in his own that though gnarled and old was still stronger than hers. She clung like a child, eyes fixed on his face, seeming to see nothing in it but what she had always seen: strength, and a bulwark against fear. He spoke softly to her, as he would soothe a restive mare. “Yes, child, I’m here. Are you going to wake now and be strong?”

  “I am awake,” she said in a thread of a voice. “Is he here?”

  Ay understood her. He said, “I won’t let him harm you.”

  “Make him go away,” she said. “Send him to the ends of the earth. Forbid him to come back.”

  “Hush,” he said. “Hush.”

  She struggled to rise. Her voice rose to almost its old clarity. “I command you!”

  A gaggle of priests and physicians leaped to subdue her. Ay waved them back. He held the queen by the hand, supporting her, speaking firmly. “You will rest, and you will recover your strength. Then you may command as you judge best.”

  “I can judge now,” she said. “I want him sent away.” But she sounded sulky rather than imperious, and she lay back when he urged her, subdued by his gentle compulsion. Under it she sipped a cup of water and ate a little broth with herbs in it, and suffered a round of prayers and incantations. Ay kept those brief, though the priests and physicians would have made of it a high rite. He knew as well as Nofret did that the queen was not s
trong enough for such a carrying on.

  When she slept she was still fevered, but much less than before. Nofret began to believe that the only poison was fear, and the only sickness in her spirit. Such could kill her just as surely as either plague or potion. That was frightening, but not in the same way as if it had been Horemheb’s hirelings colluding in the queen’s death.

  Forty-Five

  Queen Ankhesenamon married the Lord Ay quietly in deference to her recent illness, and crowned him with her own hands, setting on his head the Two Crowns of the kings of Egypt. He bore the weight and the honor with becoming dignity and no great excess of arrogance. “I stand between the worlds,” he said to his queen. “Soon I become Osiris. Then, lady, look you well to the one who may be Horus after me.”

  Ankhesenamon inclined her head, but that was respect, no more. She did not look at Horemheb, who attended the ceremony in his office of General of the Armies. Nor did he betray anger that she had so defied him. He could wait, his stance said. The old man would die. Then he would have what he had always wanted.

  He had betrayed nothing of what she had done to evade him, nor could anyone prove that his servants had let slip the knowledge. Maybe the scribes talked. Maybe the messengers were indiscreet over their wine. However that might be, it was known in Egypt that the queen, desperate to escape an Egyptian marriage, had sent to an enemy and begged him for a son. The charitable ascribed it to a madness of grief. Most were not so swift to spare her, even as lovely as she was, and as frail still from her sickness.

  She was not too frail to be bedded on her wedding night, but Nofret had reason to believe that they did no more than sleep chastely side by side. Lady Tey had remained in Thebes, discreetly out of the way; but her presence loomed large in everyone’s memory. Ay had neither put her aside nor repudiated her. He had chosen as a king might, to have two wives: one of the heart, and one who was his queen.

  Certainly, after the first few necessary nights, Ay kept to the king’s palace and Ankhesenamon to the queen’s. In the day they shared the ruling of Egypt, side by side on slightly mismatched thrones. Tutankhamon’s had gone to the tomb with him. Ay’s was new, Ankhesenamon’s the one she had always had, that no doubt would be buried with her.